Video-surveillance is a fast growing market which tends to become increasingly widespread for ubiquitous applications. It is used in various contexts such as crime prevention, public areas security purposes, or traffic monitoring.
The control of a video-camera is required at the installation of a video surveillance system, or on the fly, for example to adapt an initial configuration of the video-camera. Physical and logical settings can be concerned by the configuration. When physical settings are adjusted, they usually entail a modification of the field of view of the video-camera and as a consequence, a modification of the captured scene. Physical settings include the pan, i.e., the horizontal angular position of the video-camera, the tilt, i.e., its vertical angular position, and the focal length which has a direct impact on the zoom. The configuration can also concern logical parameters such as the resolution (e.g., 720×480 for a standard definition or 1920×1080 for a high resolution), the frame rate (e.g. from 1 frame per second (fps) for securing parking lots to 30 fps for securing casinos), the video compression algorithm which is configured to encode and decode a digital video stream (e.g., MJPEG, MPEG-4 or H.264), the aspect ratio (e.g., 4:3 usually used for standard definition cameras or 16:9 for HDTV formats), network parameters (e.g., the source and destination IP addresses or the TCP/UDP ports) and, when required, the type of video content analysis to apply. Other settings related to video content analysis such as target tracking, motion detection or cross line detection thereby enabling the trigger of an alert may also be considered.
An operator may control a video-camera by physically accessing it, i.e. by connecting a control device to the video-camera by means of a physical cable. However, such solution is not adapted when the video-camera to control is not easily accessible, e.g., when the video-camera is high up. An alternative solution consists in configuring the video-camera from a video-surveillance center displaying multiple scenes from different cameras on multiple screens. However, the correspondence between a given scene displayed on one screen of the video-surveillance center and a given location (i.e., corresponding to the location of the video-camera generating the video stream currently displayed on the given screen) is not necessarily stored in a database of the video-surveillance system, and the association, when operated by an operator, may be difficult, particularly when the displayed scenes look similar, e.g., when they all display underground platforms.
There is thus a need to provide a method for facilitating the control of a video-camera in a video-surveillance system.